UnManaged Attachments

[AndrewRudin]

Add the ability when enabling attachments on feature classes, I have the option to store just a link to files in the attachments table.  I would much rather store Photos, Documents, and other files related to a feature in a place on a shared drive so anyone and any application can easily get to them without ArcGIS.   I don't want to store blobs for photos and documents in our database.  Storing blobs in SDE means any other application we write that needs to see those attachments will have to tack on some ArcObjects code to pull out the file.

This would be similar to the difference between managed and unmanaged raster catalogs.

[MikeJensen]

Hey everyone! This is a great post! Our users have so many great ideas, and there are times when we don't have the ability to address each idea as quickly as we would like. Moving forward, if you are still looking for ways to use hyperlinks as an alternative to attachments, please check out the following blog: A suite of sample geoprocessing tools for managing hyperlinks. These tools work similar to the suite of attachment tools, with the same concept. We hope our users find them to be helpful in meeting their individual and organizational needs. 🙂

[BrittanyBurson]

We are trying to lean heavily on our Enterprise GIS deployment but also can't bloat our sde with thousands of attachments, inspection photos, etc. We have OpenText content management server available but this post does not give me a lot of hope we will be able to integrate it via hyperlink so easily. How is everyone else managing large volumes of attachments in a large Enterprise deployment? 

Either way, Kudo from me.